The Ski Journal • Volume 18, Issue 1 • 3:10 TO DURANGO

The official way to hail a train is to cross your arms back and forth over your knees–a move more likely to be found at a middle school dance than a wilderness stop. Hearing the whistle of the train and praying they would A) stop and B) have space, we danced. And jumped. And screamed. We crossed our arms over our legs so fast we almost started flying home. The spectacle was enough to not only make the train stop, but garner the attention of every single passenger aboard the scenic Narrow Gauge Silverton-Durango line. More than a hundred heads with slacked jaws hung out the open-air cabins; we were likely the most interesting wildlife encounter they’d see the entire day.

I chuckled at the comment. No one has ever accused me of skiing fast. Uphill, maybe. But I’m far from a freeride charger, as my brakeless gram-counting minimal bindings showed.

I’ve done a lot of ridiculous things on skis. Well, perhaps I ought to say with skis. Often, they’re on my back—catching every branch, ledge and bush like a giraffe attempting an army crawl. Far from snow, but close enough to seem plausible, carried through bush, desert, talus and rivers.

But this was one of the more ridiculous things I ever did to my skis. The smell of gasoline was overwhelming, particularly at quarter to five in the morning. I pressed the lever again, shooting low grade petrol (premium is for Summit County skiers, we joked) onto my ski bases—and all over the pavement. Isaiah Branch-Boyle, a Silverton, CO, local, laughed as I wiped away resin-like climbing skin residue with a paper towel.

“No better solvent than gas-o-line,” he said, enunciating the word like in the eponymous pop song.

I wondered if the gas station had a security camera. But in these parts, it’s unlikely they would gripe. Just another day in skiing’s Wild West.

The Silverton side of the San Juans maintains a cowboy-ish irreverence despite (or perhaps in spite of) its proximity to Telluride’s opulence and Durango’s recent influx of Texans and technocrats. “Redneck Chamonix,” the locals call it. If you’re looking to get into hanging ramps and closeout couloirs while wearing Carhartts, the moniker fits; if you’re looking at access, well, there’s something to be desired if you come expecting the Aiguille du Midi and find dilapidated mining infrastructure. Between Molas Pass (just under 11,000 feet) and Red Mountain Pass (just over 11,000 feet), there are enough high-altitude roadside attractions to keep the weekend warriors satiated. But if you want to get away from the highway lines and the classics, there’s not a lot of beta. The locals prefer to keep it that way.

Silverton is a place where the best deal on pizza comes from the gas station. Where the town’s culinary offerings (which, according to any true local, fervently includes the petrol depot) range from pizza and beer to beer and pizza. Where majority unpaved streets host more salvage-titled Ford Rangers than new, POW-stickered Tacomas.

This hamlet was the anti-hero outlaw my closest ski partner, Thor Retzlaff, and I sought. Boots planted firmly in the gravel roads of downtown, downturned brim of a ballcap tucked beneath a foam mountaineering helmet, trigger finger tickling stoppers and bail ’biners holstered on a lingerie-like skimo harness. There Silverton stands, unapologetically itself, prepared to duel every flaccid, colorless aphorism of a mundane, homogenized, overtly commercial industry.

We could’ve picked up snowboarding like a half-dozen of my burnt-out ski friends. But we believed skiing’s renegade soul could still be resuscitated. An injection of bushwhacking and steep exposure was the punk rock oomph we (and the industry, in our less than humble opinions) needed. It was only fitting that, despite a jaded dismissal of Lower 48 skiing not feeling “out there” enough, Colorado—yes, that Colorado, only five hours driving from that Vail—would be our stage.

We hitched a ride from the edge of town to the top of Molas Pass and, rather than heading uphill toward the roadside classics, pointed our skis and oversize packs downward to the Animas River and the towering peaks of the Weminuche rising in the distance.

The amphitheater of the Grenadiers sub-range defies most standard constructs of mountains. Warping couloirs and hanging faces described in such gastronomic fashion as “Pringles” and “bear claws” exist somewhere between a Seussian alpine and a ski mountaineer’s fantasy; the range hardly makes sense topographically.

Our style of ski alpinism is a smorgasbord of practical utilitarian and impractical aesthetic choices. We chose bivies instead of tents to save weight; we brought two pounds of maté to enjoy a mindset of abundance rather than scarcity. We didn’t bring a water filter or ski crampons. We brought a chess board. We were walking (and skiing) contradictions, but at least we were self-aware.

We skied, shuffled, sidestepped and scooched for about 10 minutes. The snow ended abruptly, and we put our skis on our backs and began walking. At the bottom of the canyon, we crossed dilapidated railway ties and noted the time. If we didn’t wish to climb out of this canyon in reverse at the end of our trip, we had to flag down the following Monday afternoon’s 3:10 pm narrow gauge train to Durango. Without tickets, there was no guarantee there’d be seats available, nor that the train would even brake at an unscheduled wilderness stop. But going in with minimal beta was part of the plan. First we show

The Ski Journal - Volume 18, Issue 1

3:10 TO DURANGO

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